• GoFundMe, a "fundraising site for personal causes and life-events," which I found through this fundraising video and story about a child with a rare disease.
• Kickstarter
• Patreon (recurring funding for artists and creators) Creators receive millions of dollars each month in support from their patrons
• PubSlush.com (crowdfunding for the literary world). Read My Pubslush Experience ((How one author got to NY Comic Con with the help of Pubslush) About Claribel Ortega. “Pubslush is more than just a crowdfunding platform,” said Amanda, “it’s a community of readers, writers and publishers and it can really help get books in the hands of readers at an earlier phase.”
• Spot.us (community-funded reporting--"not accepting pitches at this time, July 2014)
• Indiegogo
• Fundable (crowdfunding for small businesses)
• Razoo (online fundraising for nonprofits and causes)
• EquityNet (business funding through investors)
See Merchant Maverick's evaluations of these and other crowdfunding sites.

CROWDFUNDING FRAUD
• Fund Me or Fraud Me? Crowdfunding Scams Are on the Rise (ConsumerReports)
• Crowdfunding Fraud: How Big is the Threat? (CJ Cornell and Charles Luzar , Crowdfund Insider, 3-20-14)
• The Feds Take Action Against Crowdfunding Fraud, and It's About Time (Rick Cohen, Nonprofit Quarterly, 7-2-15) Crowdfunding is largely the unregulated Wild West, requiring donors to protect themselves from fraud and deception, but the Federal Trade Commission landed hard on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. It may be just what the doctor ordered to protect people donating to odd and sundry products and companies pitched on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. "As Jack Karsten and Darrell West note in a Brookings blog posting, a crowdfunding platform for raising capital 'allows an entrepreneur to bypass traditional financing, which benefits small projects that would not otherwise qualify for a loan or venture capital investment.' Th at is partly the theory behind the Obama Administration’s endorsement of the equity crowdfunding provisions in the JOBS Act, providing capital to entrepreneurs for products that may not turn a profit for a very long time, but capital in which the investors simply want and expect a reward such as a trinket or copy of the product rather than an equity ownership stake in the company."

• EndNote (the industry standard software tool for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations and references on the Windows and Macintosh desktop--not to be confused with EverNote)

• Express Scribe Transcription Software A typist can install it on their computer and control audio playback using a transcription foot pedal or keyboard (with 'hot' keys). This transcribing software also offers valuable features for typists including variable speed playback, multi-channel control, playing video, file management, and more.

• LiveScribe Echo (8 GB Echo Smartpen). There are also 2 GB, 4 GB, and 6 GB SmartPens.) A genuinely helpful recorder-pen-and-paper combination for capturing and reviewing notes from lectures and interviews, and, using those notes, to find a particular point in audio recording. Its special features (a microphone for recording audio, a speaker for playing back recording, and a camera in the tip of the ballpoint pen, which queues up with that point in audio. As you review your notes, tap one word from part of the interview you didn't catch and it plays back audio from that point. Watch/​listen to this C/​Net review. It is smart enough to know when you start a new page. It's expensive, however. In addition to the basic equipment you must purchase special notebooks on which to write, plus cartridges that are smaller than usual (easy to lose and you must replace them more often); and you have to charge it daily. If you tend to lose pens, this could be an expensive proposition. (Great gift for a college student.)
• Alternatives to the LiveScribe SmartPen as note-taking devices include SoundNote (iPad's note-taking device), Notability, and AudioNote, a notepad and voice recorder you can download to your PC.
• PDF Creator. PDFCreator is a tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application: If you can print a document, you can use this tool--say you have a text that you want to send as a PDF instead of a Word file. See C=Net's writeup , and you can download the software there.

• Writing Alone, Together (Bonnie Tsui, Draft, Opinionator, NY Times, 7-7-14) What does it mean to write in fellowship? "An unheralded plus of the shared writing space is the joy of not talking about writing."
• A Cubicle for You and Your Muse (Liesl Schillinger, NY Times, 10-9-05)
• In a D.C. writers room, scribes find motivation (Emily Wax, Washington Post, 12-25-12)
• CoworkingBoston (coworking space, but not just writers)
• The Grotto (the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an office for the creative, self-employed people who by definition don’t need to punch a clock. From its beginnings, it’s been a place where narrative artists–writers, filmmakers and the like–welcome the discipline of structure in their work lives, and build a community of peers)
• Toronto Writers Centre
• Writers Junction (an affordable shared workspace for writers in Santa Monica, CA)
• The Writers WorkSpace (a membership-based work and meeting space for writers of all genres in Chicago)

"Sitting is the new smoking." Standing for long periods is not an instant fix, if you're not doing it ergonomically, says a colleague. It takes some getting used to, even some coaching. You have to have proper posture, shift your weight as needed, and engage your core in a new way. You can't slump

And on a similar note, consider these for elevating your laptop:
• mStand Laptop Stand (raises your notebook screen height 5.9 inches for better ergonomics and tilts it to bring the screen closer and improve airflow around laptop)
• Griffin Technology GC16034 Elevator Laptop Stand (holds your portable computer safely at just the right height to match external monitors and to save your aching neck). Says designer Robin B., "lifted my MacBook up in the air so I could push it back and have the full extended keyboard out in front on my desk. This helped my wrists and back."

As Good as It Gets: Nominations for Best Film About a Writer (Roger Rosenblatt, Sunday Book Review, NY Times, 2-22-13).
• His nominations (read the article to get his rationale): “The Third Man” (1949), “Starting Out in the Evening” (2007), and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961).
• His sentimental favorite: “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994).
• His runners-up: “The Front,” about Hollywood blacklisting; Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry”; “Stranger Than Fiction"; “Shadowlands”; “Barton Fink”; “Adaptation”; the creepy “Secret Window”; the scary “Misery”; and “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.
• "Writers, with the exception of that movie I saw as a kid," writes Rosenblatt, 'are variously crazy (Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”), reckless (Michael Douglas in “Wonder Boys”), cranky (Van Johnson in “23 Paces to Baker Street”), self-destructive (Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend”), without principle (William Holden in “Sunset Boulevard”) and/​or flailing (Paul Giamatti in “Sideways”). '
• Rosenblatt doesn't include films about journalists, because they are tethered to institutions, but does list these films as best in that subgenre: “Citizen Kane,” “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “It Happened One Night,” “Foreign Correspondent.”
Any good movies about writers missing from this list?
One I can think of: Jay Parini's "The Last Station," about the last year of Tolstoy's life.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey.
Willard Spiegelman reviews the book, "Habit Their Way" (WSJ, 6-7-13): This guide to artists' and writers' daily regimens explains how, where and with what pen to create a masterpiece. Examples: "The painter Chuck Close says, 'Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.' " John Cheever's is surely one of the strangest rituals. This book started as the blog Daily Routines.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius (a TED Talk, 2-9-09, as muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses) . She shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

• Examined Lives by Phyllis Rose (American Scholar, Autumn 2013). "You cannot be a good writer if you have not been a good reader, and I would say that a writer’s responsiveness to other writers, whether discussed or held private, is the thing without which literary merit cannot exist."

How the Literary Class System Is Impoverishing Literature (LorraineBerry, LitHub, 12-4-15) "...not so much about money as it is about class, about being born into a system that tells you it is all right to do something artistic. But for those on the outside of that system “being artistic” is seen as throwing away your one chance to make something of yourself. And even when you make something of yourself, there can be a stigma about being “disloyal” to your class."

How to Succeed as an Author: Give Up on Writing. The rancid smell of 21st century literary success. (Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, essay for The New Republic, 10-24-13) "When does a novelist write novels? Writing the books themselves gets fit in here and there, like making time for taking out the trash before bed. I have grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure—when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them."

How to Write a Great Novel (Alexandra Alter, WSJ, 11-13-09). From writing in the bathroom (Junot Díaz) to dressing in character (Nicholson Baker), 11 top authors share their methods for getting the story on the page.

Is the Bohemian Dead? (Katie Roiphe, Slate, 5-8-13). In her new memoir, Country Girl, Edna O’Brien recalls when writers were drunk, brawling, and fabulous. Facebook: Once, writers were drunken brawlers. Now they are married and cook a lovely risotto.

The Love Carousel: Literary Speed Dating at Housing Works in SoHo (J.T. Price, The Millions, 9-5-13). "Each participant found at the entrance a neon green envelope, including a library card in manila sleeve for taking notes on each “date,” and a name tag featuring the handle of a character from a favorite book. These would be our pseudonyms for the night. Each date would last an almost militantly enforced four minutes. A single case of lingering could cause the entire caterpillar crawl to go legs up. There was to be no lingering. Lingering is for books."

19 Writing Tips from Writers and Editors for the New Yorker (Grace Bellow, BuzzFeed, 3-12-14) Secrets on reporting and storytelling from some of the best in the business. Here's Evan Ratliff: "I don't think it's feasible to work a full-time job and be able to do this type of reporting. You set aside two hours on Monday and make a bunch of calls. You get one person, and they start calling you back over the next couple of days, and you're doing other things. So it really requires dedicated time. To me, that's one of the dilemmas of longform magazine writing. It's really done best by staff writers and freelancers who dedicate all of their time to it. It's a job that you have to be doing all the time. Then the question of getting paid enough to compensate for that time is the one that everyone deals with in some way or another."

The Paris Review Interviews (sampling from an amazing series of interviews with prominent authors, made available online by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the generous support of Richard and Jeanne Fisher)

Plot Twist: Philip Carlo, true crime writer with Lou Gehrig's disease, is working on his memoir. His deadline: his own death.

What do bad writers and toddlers have in common? (Megan Sharma, PR Daily, 5-15-18) Self-absorption, resistance to change.What Writers Must Do: 'Love People' (Joe Fassler, The Atlantic, 6-3-14). Author Rupert Thomson says a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem taught him the value of risk. "You can’t choose who to love, or how—but if you remain open to experience, love will teach you a great deal about yourself, and can help lead you in the right direction."
Someone said to W. H. Auden, “Is it true that you can only write what you know? And he said, “Yes, but you can only know what you know once you’ve written it.”

When I broke down at work, I realised I was responsible for my own wellbeing (Jess Phillips, The Guardian, 3-30-16) Previously, I had allowed everything to leak into everything else....Before my burnout, I felt time management was somehow inapplicable to me. Now my attitude has changed, and I have developed a daily question for myself: “What matters most today and how am I going to realise my priorities?” ... Wellbeing demands time, although we often tell ourselves we just don’t have it. I now try to establish with others what I’m not prepared to make time for. "

Writing My Way to a New Self (Hana Schank, Opinionator, NY Times, 3-21-15) "Now, instead of having to call editors or sources, one could simply email them. And while on the phone I was awkward and stiff, in email I was my charming inner self. The phone meant talking, but email meant writing, and writing was something I could do."

"Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say."
~Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

"I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment...I've learned a lot I could not have learned if I were not a writer."
~ William Trevor

“People ask me, ‘Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, about love, the way others do?’. . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it. . . There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”
~ M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

• Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America (Dan Cois, NY Times Magazine, 7-16-13). Handey is best known as the writer and performer of “Deep Thoughts,” a series of quasi-philosophical cracked aphorisms that ran on “Saturday Night Live” from 1991 to 1998. ..."The archetypal Jack Handey sketch is about Frankenstein, or flying saucers, or a cat who, for some reason, can drive a car. 'Little-boy stuff,' Handey explained."

• Suicidal Thoughts: The Creative Lives and Tragic Deaths of a Prince and a Pauper (Nancy Spiller, Los Angeles Review of Books, 12-30-14) Comic Robin Williams and novelist Les Plesko, one wildly successful and the other not, both took their lives. Spiller writes persuasively about what might make creative people more susceptible to dark thoughts that they act on. Among important points made: “We accept the disease model of substance abuse,” Palumbo says. “Depression is still considered a weakness. We’re more likely to say we’re suffering from alcohol or drug abuse, rather than panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. People are still afraid of mental illness.”
• Robin Williams' widow: 'It was not depression' that killed him (Nigel M. Smith, The Guardian, 11-3-15) Susan Williams gives first interview since her husband’s death last year and reveals the actor had a debilitating brain disease called Lewy body dementia
• How Doing Nothing at 5 a.m. Gets Me Through the Day (Abigail Rasminsky, HealthLine, 4-30-18) I was experiencing my life without the nagging sense of having to produce and succeed and run, run, run.
• Is There Anybody Out There? (Abigail Rasminsky, Lenny, 5-11-18) I’m a crowdsourcer. Should I learn to make decisions on my own? Whenever I had a decision to make — should I get bangs? Should I break up with my boyfriend? — I started in on my ask-advice-from-every-human-being-I-know routine. My uncle would say, reassuringly, “Don’t worry, Ab, you’re just making the rounds.” He’d call it my “process.”
• Writers Write, Right? (Jo Eberhardt, Writer Unboxed, 5-6-18) Take time off!
• The Scandal behind "The Scandal of Scientology" (Paulette Cooper) "You may not believe this, but you can write something that some group doesn't approve of and then have a quarter of your life almost ruined. I know because it happened to me."

• Sweet Home Mississippi (Richard Grant, Sunday Review, NY Times, 11-7-15) "Sometimes living in Mississippi makes us want to weep and scream and rush back to the familiar. But Mariah has a library job here now, and we have no plans to leave. Mississippi is such a deep, strange, complicated, interesting place that we often feel ruined for living anywhere else."

13 Writers Who Grew to Hate Their Own Books (Emily Temple, Literary Hug, 1-29-18) Among them, Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962); Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962); Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners (1985); Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999, because of one story: "Brokeback"; Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), Rage (1977); Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1867) Peter Benchley, Jaws (1974). "Benchley deeply regretted the shark-paranoia that he spawned with his work. In fact, after the book was published, he became a shark conservationist and sought to educate people about the animals and their very slim threat to humans."

What Kind of Writer Are You: Cook or Baker? (Anna North, LitHub, 6-28-16) "People who know about food often say you’re either a cook or a baker; either you enjoy the freedom of putting together a savory meal to your own particular specifications, or you like the structure required for making sweets."

Writers on Writing (New York Times--a complete archive of the Writers on Writing column, a series in which writers explore literary themes)

“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.” ~ Gloria Steinem

"The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you are finished." ~ Nelson DeMille

" One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away." ~ Stephen Hawking

Resurrecting the Book Market of Baghdad (Aditi Sriram, Narratively, 12-30-13) When a car bomb obliterates Iraq’s millennium-old literary heart, a bookseller seven thousand miles away resolves that the voices of Al-Mutanabbi Street will not be forgotten.

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.” ~ John Updike

"Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying." ~ Studs Terkel

Top ten clues you may be a writer (buy a mug for your writing friends). Click on image for larger image, so you can read. This one hooked me: "Some of the letters on your keyboard are completely worn off."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." ~Anais Nin

“Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig”
~ Stephen Greenblatt

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ~ Zora Neale Hurston

"To know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely THERE--where you are not. This is the beginning of writing." ~Roland Barthes

"The story — from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
~ Ursula K. LeGuin

"When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction."
~ Philip Roth, Paris Review interview, 1986

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new ideas he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
~William Stafford, poet

"I'm compelled by language, so there are days for instance where if it sounds flat and dry I try to find something else to do that will help the book. That often means going to poets and reading poetry. That's my fuel tank. Voice and language is primary, and everything comes out of that."
~ Alice Sebold